1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to a printing system, a print control device, and a print control method.
2. Related Art
Flushing is done in printers that print by ejecting ink from a printhead in order to prevent the viscosity of ink in the ink nozzles from increasing and nozzles clogging as a result of ink viscosity increasing. Flushing is typically done after moving the printhead to a position removed from the conveyance path of the recording medium. Methods of flushing by ejecting ink onto the print medium have also been proposed to reduce the drop in throughput resulting from moving the printhead away from the conveyance path. See, for example, JP-A-2007-136722. The method described in JP-A-2007-136722 flushes the nozzles in an irregular dot pattern so that the ink ejected to the print medium for flushing is not conspicuous.
The amount of ink that is ejected, and the number of ink nozzles that eject ink, can be reduced in order to make the ejected ink unobtrusive when flushing onto the print medium. On the other hand, increasing the amount of ink is a useful way of increasing the effectiveness of the flushing operation. Because the effectiveness of flushing onto the print medium and print quality are incompatible with each other, enabling the user of the printer to set the flushing conditions based on the printing purpose and other factors is desirable.
Except for printer technicians and others with sufficient technical knowledge, typical printer users have little awareness of the flushing operation used in printers. It is therefore difficult for the user to appropriately set the flushing conditions with an understanding of the effect of flushing on print quality.